Final Project

Joseph H.

Legislator:  Vicki Truitt, Representative

(Click on the image above to enlarge.)

Hidden Dangers: Sunspots and Auroras

To Whom It May Concern:

The public should be informed about cosmic radiation; it is a serious problem in Earth’s atmosphere, but, unfortunately, many people are totally unaware of radiation and its calamitous effects.

Every time somebody steps onto an airplane, they are increasing their risk of getting cancer. Sunspots, or aurora, are not easily detectable, but they are present in our atmosphere and wreck havoc continuously. Government and commercial satellites have been rendered inoperative. Many of the strange occurrences that happen in our everyday life are caused by the radiation given off by the sun.

Depending on what the sun is doing, a solar storm can produce enough radiation to equal a significant fraction of a chest X-ray’s dosage at typical passenger altitudes of 35,000 ft. For airplane pilots and flight attendants that spend over 900 hours in the air every year, the situation is even more severe. On average, there will be four extra cases of mental retardation per 100,000 women due exposure to radiation while flying. This really frightens me considering that my mother flew while she was pregnant with me.

Frequent fliers who amass over 480 hours in the sky per year will suffer 500 extra cancer deaths per 100,000 travelers. Airline crews on polar routes will suffer over 1000 cancer deaths per 100,000 crewmembers over twenty years of travel. Frequent fliers and airline crews have a 23 in 100 percent chance of cancer, meaning that 3 million out of nearly 300 million would die supposing they traveled these routes.

The FFA needs to monitor and regulate radiation exposure for airline crews. Currently, their guidelines are too technical for pilots and flight attendants to understand, so they need to be rewritten.

On January 6, 1997 X-ray photographs taken by the YOHKOH satellite from earth’s orbit revealed a coronal storm brewing from a small region of the Corona that was a few hundred times the size of Earth. By the 7^th, the solar astronomers recognized that a major Coronal Mass Ejection event was in progress, and in a sequence of daily X-ray images, the details played themselves out in a deadly dance of magnetic fields, plasma, and electromagnetic radiation. A cloud of plasma was hurled away from the sun at 1 million mph. It was an expanding cloud over 30 million miles deep, spanning the space between the orbits of Mercury and Venus. It was “the first time a solar event had been captured from cradle to grave,” according to NASA astronomer Stephen Maran.

However, the storm had other repercussions that were far less welcomed. There was nothing scientists could do in the face of the calamity except pray that the Earth’s magnetic field would repel most of the cloud like some gigantic security blanket. On Saturday, January 11 AT&T announced that it was having communications difficulties with the Telstar 401 satellite, which was relaying television programming between many destinations across the continent. The interplanetary coronal storm cloud, not over 30 million miles wide, slammed into the Earth’s magnetosphere. The images from YOHKOH began to deteriorate because the plasma particles and magnetic fields invaded the delicate electronic circuitry, corrupting the images with noise. It was as if a piece of the sun had reached out and touched the earth, rendering the satellite useless.

Three earlier model satellites were also disabled in 1994 by a solar storm, which triggered electrical failures. Two satellites made partial recoveries but the third one was lost completely.

The immediate repercussions of the Telstar 401 loss were significant, with many AT&T customers not having contingencies, and being left in a total blackout. On January 30, 1997 George Will of “The Washington Post” wrote an anguished editorial about space calamities that can, and will affect us.

Until recently, passive sightings or auroras were referred to as ‘other-worldly’ influences. We now have to reach a grudging accommodation with aurora and their invisible confederates that ply the ether above our heads. We have to be reminded there is a problem, but many examples of what this solar mayhem can do are easy to come by. During solar storms when the telegraph was popular, the currents were so strong that many telegraphers were nearly electrocuted. In 1879, it was discovered that sunspots are correlated with periods of strong auroral activity.

As solar storm particles arrive at the Earth and enter the magnetosphere, they temporarily set-up an invisible circulating flow of charged particles around Polar Regions of the earth: The Ring Current. This current causes magnetic field fluctuations, which in turn induce currents to flow in wires. Voltages up to 2,600 volts were recorded during the 1940 magnetic storm. On August 2, 1972, the Bureau of Reclamation power station in Watertown, South Dakota was subjected to large swings in power line voltages up to 25,000 volts.

Perhaps the most dramatic, recent impact occurred in March 1989 when the sun produced one of the most powerful storms ever recorded. On March 13, 1989 Alaskan and Scandinavian observers were treated to a spectacular auroral display that plunged large portions of Quebec into darkness for 9 hours.

Oak Ridge National Laboratories estimated that the collateral impact of a March 1989 storm would produce a Northeast United States blackout, and cause $6 billion in damage. This storm and the October 1991 event were equivalent to the San Francisco earthquake in their impact upon the national economy.

On June 4, 1989 a powerful as pipeline explosion demolished part of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, killing 500 children who were coming home for Christmas. No one suspected the aurora and the invisible corrosion currents is spawned over time. The sad thing is the world’s major newspapers did not report this catastrophe.

There is a long list of satellites that have been confirmed to have been directly affected by solar systems and the enhanced particle fluxes the satellites intercept. GOES-4 visible and infrared spin-scan radiometer was disabled for 45 minutes after the arrival of high-energy protons from a solar flare. The strong electrical currents flowing during a week of intense auroral activity in February 1982 disabled mareces-B, a marine navigational satellite. The SOHO satellite recently showed two comets plunging into the sun, and hours later, the sun disgorged a massive cloud of plasma. Solar storms are referred to as ‘the ultimate Stealth Bombers’ because they wipe out large areas. Billions of dollars of commercial satellite insurance money rides on whether a satellite failure was an “Act of God”(uninsurable) or a subtle design flaw, which is insurable.

A satellite is unrecoverable, and only apparent correlation’s in time and space can be offered as evidence that a specific solar event affected a satellite in a certain way, leaving its neighbors unaffected.

Scientists do know how radiation affects satellites that represent a non-threatening population. The most destructive ingredient of solar system activity for satellites seems to be in high-energy electrons, which do their damage by producing deep dielectric charging in unprotected parts of the satellite.

On May 17, 1998 PanAmSat’s Galaxy IV satellite lost control, and shut down service for millions of pagers in North America. Between April 27 and May 6, 7 CME’s and two very powerful solar flares temporarily produced a new radiation belt orbiting the earth. The POLAR satellite had to be shut down for several hours to recover. This storm period recorded the maximum amount of electron fluxes. It isn’t a single intense storm that seems to do the dirty work, but a sustained period of high electron storm activity near the spacecraft. Solar activity doesn’t have to take a direct swipe at a satellite to do it harm by throwing high-energy particles at it.

Most people have an instinctive fear of radiation and its potential biological effects. Every day you receive a free dose of environmental radiation that adds up to 360 millirems per year That’s 4-5 chest X-rays of radiation. A person obtains between 12 and 100 cancers per 100,000 people for every 1000 millirems of additional dosage per year. Cancer risks are generally related to radiation exposure.

During the Apollo program, there were several near misses between the astronauts walking on the moon and a deadly solar storm event. The Apollo 12 astronauts walked on the moon a few short weeks after a major solar proton flare would have bathed the astronauts in a 100 rem blast of radiation The cosmonauts on MIR received the daily dosage of radiation that is equal to 8 chest X-rays per day. One day in 1989, in just a few hours they received the maximum amount of allowable radiation for an entire year.

The next solar cycle is already upon us, and if the blackouts, communications outages, and satellite problems of the last few cycles are any indication, we could be in for some interesting denials of cause and effect. The only reason satellites have not been equipped with lots radiation shielding is because of cost. Shielding is just dead weight, but it cost as much as all of the technology to send to space, so the engineers put on as little shielding as they think will still allow the satellite to function properly.

There are many elements to the problem of cosmic radiation that are not mysteries to satellite designers. In the 60’s, NASA became a leader in developing and refining models of the environment through the Trapped Radiation Environment Modeling Program. The physics based models will be able to take advantage of more than 30 years experience in the advances of plasma physics. Unfortunately, as more satellites become disabled by ‘mysterious’ events, we are having to rediscover the importance of old lessons in satellite design and the costs are passed on to us as the end users.

I know that I might sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I am just relaying the facts. I was enraged after finding all this out that this has not been a top news story for the past 50 years. Airplane travel is dangerous because of radiation. Our satellites are constantly being destroyed by auroras. Radiation does cause cancer and we are being exposed to too much of it. And yes, scientists and engineers know more about the causes and effects of auroras and sunspots than they want the American public to know. So I say it is time the public does find out about aurora’s effects, which have been blamed on El Nino for the past few years. We definitely deserve the truth.

Sincerely,

           

Works Cited

Compostion of the Primary Cosmic Radiation. http://www.nucleaonics-online.com/6 f11.html

O denwald, Dr. Sten. Solar Storms and you: Classroom Activities. “Solar Storm Eyed as Satellite Killer."

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/workbook/storms.html

O denwald, Dr. Sten. Solar Storms and you: Classroom Activities. “Cosmic Radiaton Creates Unfriendly Skies." http://image.gsfc.gov/poetry/workbook/p67.html

O denwald, Dr. Sten. Solar Storms and you: Human Impacts. “Solar Storms: The Silent Menace.” 1988. http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/workbook/storms.html

Last Updated:  09/07/01